


Ever After

by willowoftheriver



Series: fearfully made [6]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Beltane, Birth Defects, Childbirth, Children, Crows, Druids, F/M, Female Balinor, Female Merlin (Merlin), Genderbending, Half-Sibling Incest, Infant Death, Insanity, Paganism, Period-Typical Sexism, Pregnancy, Revelations, Rituals, Sex Magic, by that i mean arthur's outdated views on women
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 04:27:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20383654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: Arthur and Merlin finally learn a difficult truth.





	Ever After

**Author's Note:**

> "It all goes back and back to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our steads."  
-George R.R. Martin, _ A Storm of Swords _

Camelot has secrets. There are far too many to list, and over the years, many of them have been lost to time, remembered only by the stone of the castle and the tapestries on the walls, hanging there dusty and knowing.

As for the ones that still exist, lingering behind closed doors, they’re always held by someone. In the last years of Uther’s rule, and so far during Arthur’s, Merlin is that someone—intrigue is in her nature and sooner or later she roots out every truth, holding the information close to her heart for later use. She’d known the secret of Arthur’s birth and Morgana’s magic and betrayal, Catrina’s true form and Sophia’s true nature, Lancelot’s ignoble blood. Now she knows everything about her courtiers, about backroom deals and affairs and who might just be eyeing the crown on Arthur’s head with envy.

Merlin is a queen of secrets, these days.

But before her, there was Gaius. Once, before life at court had begun to disgust him so much he became as uninvolved as possible, he had been a friend and confidant and observer, and he had held the secrets.

He’d known about Uther’s predilection for other men’s wives, about his over-fondness for drink. He’d known that Ygraine was barren, and that Uther was willing to go to any length for an heir, no matter the price. He’d known, even as he’d watched sorcerers burn on the pyre, that his King was a hypocrite who had once used magic himself. He’d known about Morgause, born healthy and alive and spirited away to the Priestesses of the Old Religion.

All of those secrets, however, have passed. Some of them are known, while others are irrelevant, faded away into the echoes of time.

But there is still one that he keeps.

.

Morgana’s been in the ground for over a decade now, run so far through with Excalibur that her blood gushed over the hilt onto Merlin’s hands. Arthur thought about having the body burned, but the ghost of the person he’d once cared about had been very present in her lax, white face. And though that person had been dead for a very long time before the body followed, he’d had her interred in the Pendragon crypt, as far away from Uther as the space allowed.

And then he’d shut the doors.

(He won’t open them again for a very long time.)

.

Merlin goes to the childbed more frequently than Arthur would ever like. She’s borne him plenty of sons by now—an heir and a spare already in place even before Uther’s untimely demise. They’d called their second born Constantine after Arthur’s grandfather in an attempt to ward off some of the disdain Uther had already harbored for Balin, the cold scowl that came over his face any time the child’s name was even mentioned.

It hadn’t worked, and their third son, born a touch prematurely just around the time Uther’s corpse was cooling in the crypt, Merlin named Alaric. (The Druids have a long memory, Arthur’s learned, and even though Rome’s empire is no more, hasn’t been for a few decades now, they’ll _never_ forgive the slaughter at Mona.)

Out of that transitory period of chaos and war, after Arthur finally sat uncontested on the throne rightfully his and Merlin had washed Morgana’s blood from her hands, scraped it out from under her nails, his first daughter is born. Branwen, they call her, because her hair is like her mother’s, as black as a raven’s feathers.

Then comes Meriadoc. Rhiannydd. Nerys. Aeron. Mairwen. Llewellyn.

Arthur knows he proves himself a man, the highest in all of Albion, each time he gets her with child. Because she’s not just Merlin; she never has been, even in the beginning when he’d only been able to see a bumbling peasant in an unflattering dress.

Now when he looks at her, he sees nature itself. She’s the flow of a river, the bloom of flowers, the rustle of leaves in the air, the soft winter snow. All of it unending beneath her skin.

Emrys, he’s been told, means “immortal” in the Druids’ tongue. In her, life begins and ends and begins again.

But he’s still terrified every time she labors. And he doesn’t need any more children.

.

Arthur loves his children, but he’s not sure he likes all of them.

Balin has a sharp mind. He would perhaps make a fine heir for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s library, but for a kingdom, Arthur doesn’t know. If only he would apply some of that mind to statesmanship or warcraft, but none of that comes naturally to him. Only magic does.

His power is not as impressive as his mother’s, of course, but that’s an unfair way to measure any sorcerer. He’s certainly every bit as powerful as, say, Sir Mordred, who Merlin has noted sourly on several occasions has great ability.

(Arthur never has figured out why Merlin so dislikes the man that boy from so long ago has grown up to be.)

Constantine favors Uther quite a bit in the face, even exceeding their other children, and more so in the love of drink he develops more and more each day. But he can wield a sword with all the finesse Balin lacks, and Arthur supposes that if Gwaine can manage it drunk, so can Constantine. Arthur never experienced it himself, but he supposes it’s only natural for the second son to be . . . listless. The firstborn has his place, knows his path, goes along it as best he can. What’s left for the second?

Arthur thinks that in Alaric, he sees the potential to make a great successor to his namesake. If only his bones just weren’t so _fragile_. Gaius is at a loss, _Merlin’s magic_ is at a loss, and how can the boy ever even train, much less survive a battlefield, if his arms can’t take the force of a blow to his blade?

Branwen has the Sight, just as strong as Morgana ever did. Even in her crib as a babe, she had tossed and turned as much as she was able, screaming until she was hoarse. She couldn’t tell them why, then. Now Merlin casts spells over her, gives her talismans to wear around her wrist and hang on her bedposts. She’s . . . stable, now, though the dreams, and even the waking visions, are so strong that some still slip through.

(Arthur had never really appreciated just what kind of effect such a thing would have on the mind. What it may have done to Morgana’s.)

If he had the luxury of choosing his successor, without regard to birth order or gender, at this moment he would pick Nerys. Perhaps that would change in the future, once Mairwen and Llewellyn were no longer at their mother’s breast, or Aeron was old enough to say more than a few words at a time. But for now, definitely Nerys.

Meriadoc does try his best, but he has a stammer and he’s timid and simply none of that can make a king. Rhiannydd will make a fine queen one day in some distant kingdom, but not in the same way as Merlin. Giving support to a husband and managing a household and setting fashion trends among noble ladies, yes, but actually having a hand in ruling? Never.

Nerys was born auspiciously, in the caul. The harvest the year of her birth was particularly bountiful. Her bones are strong and she has a head for strategy, a keen eye for politics. But of course, a woman can’t lead her troops onto a battlefield, or crush her enemies with her own hands. Morgana had subverted that natural order and look where it got her.

(And Arthur really does try not to play favorites with his children, whatever he thinks of them. It’s not up to him to decide his successor, anyway.)

.

More and more of the Old Ways have slowly, cautiously, come back following Uther’s death. Most of Camelot’s population still keeps the Sabbath, threading their way into churches to sit beneath the stained glass and kneel on hard wooden floors—Arthur goes primarily to keep familiar with his Latin, to be honest—but charms and spells and soothsaying have become increasingly commonplace throughout the rest of the week. And the calendar is dotted with more holidays than there used to be, all the pagan observances of the natural cycles of the year.

One of the most elaborate (which is getting even larger and grander every year) is the festival on the Beltane, used to ensure a good harvest. Uther would’ve probably thought it obscene, had he lived to see it, but the harvests have been a tenfold more productive throughout Arthur’s reign, enough for the people to survive a number of winters on what’s stored alone should that eventuality ever come. So he sees no problem with this particular obscenity.

Various virgin girls of childbearing age—volunteers, Merlin made sure—are currently jumping, nude, over the small bonfires scattered throughout the area just outside the main gates. Elsewhere, at the border of the forest, a hunt is getting underway, another virgin—again, a carefully selected volunteer, a bit more magically in-tune than the rest—sitting masked on a dais, the prize for whichever hunter kills the marked stag. Roving groups of robed Druids, Sir Mordred at their forefront, climb trees with golden knives in hand to cut down the sacred mistletoe, then use it to anoint the white bulls they slit the throats of. Other bulls and cows of less significant coloration are herded carefully between the fires to catch some of the virgins’ fruitfulness.

Then there are the effigies, the life sized woven wicker figures that are danced around, showered with herbs and oils, set alight. In the uncivilized past, they would’ve been far bigger, filled to bursting with live victims. Even earlier than that, and perhaps officiants would be subjecting men to the threefold death and sinking their bodies in the bogs. Even kings weren’t exempt from that end in those days, but May Day is a far pleasanter occasion in these modern times.

Arthur sits in the dirt, only the simplest of wooden crowns distinguishing him from any other man, and before him, Merlin traces a circle upon the ground with the tip of a stick. She herself is practically in rags, a dress of colorless scraps and no shoes, the soles of her feet pressing straight to the earth. No crown, no jewels, just a crude kind of necklace fashioned from plain iron in the form of a snake. It eats itself where it loops down, meeting between her breasts—a symbol from one of the ancient, yellowed books she’s collected, written in one of the great old empires that now sit in ruin. Arthur doesn’t particularly care to know what it means.

Merlin draws runes within the circle, chanting in Druidic and dead tongues, writhing and clawing at dirt as her attendants hover around her, careful to move in the way she’s choreographed them to.

“As happens in the heavens so repeats on the earth, in the soul, in the womb. As has been so shall be again. As the blood flows within my own . . .” Merlin slices her palm open with no hesitation, the athame dropping to the ground an instant before the blood flows freely down beside it. “As the seed grows inside me . . .”

Merlin’s chest heaves, legs askew beneath her, hair wild down around her shoulders. The dress clings indecently to the fullness of her breasts, her gravid belly, the ripe fertility she wishes to impose into the very dirt itself.

“Throughout all the land beneath the Head of the Dragon, as in flesh, as in dirt . . .”

Merlin sighs and moans and chants, chants, chants until her eyes are ablaze with gold, no pupil, no iris, no white. Arthur knows that he is, technically, a creature born of magic, for all that he’s numb to it, but on these nights, only these, he _can_ feel the stir in the air around him, the hum in the ground beneath his hands. And always at the center of it, her—the inverse of an eye of a storm, the epicenter that generates it, focuses it, radiates it out.

As her words turn to murmurs under her breath, Merlin slinks along towards him on filthy hands and knees, breaking the circle as she always does. Her attendants disperse after their mistress; off into the crowd, hands reaching greedily for whatever men were lucky enough to have caught their eyes.

Merlin rests her chin on Arthur’s knee, runs a languid finger over his exposed collarbone and down his chest. Then she hooks it in the material of his shirt and pushes to her feet, drawing him along with her back to the center of her broken, bloody circle.

She lets go and dodges out of his grip the second they’re there, of course, because this _is_ _Mer_lin, but he catches her with ease, pushes her laughing to the ground. Her fingers dig into the dirt once more as he hikes that hideous dress up around her hips.

And the crows, gathered in a flock of fluttering black feathers and glistening eyes all along the furthest edge of the circle, watch them until morning.

.

The harvest fails that year.

.

Gaius knows something is wrong from the beginning of Merlin’s labor. He thinks she knows it, too.

She always has to reassure Arthur before she goes off to the birthing bed, because no revelations about Ygraine’s true cause of death have ever been enough for him to shake his dread. This time, there’s something a bit strained in her expression, a forced note in the teasing banter she levels at him to try to defuse his anxiety.

Her pains had doubled her over at a meeting of the council, as Arthur and his ministers had hammered out their final plan of rationing for the quickly approaching winter, discussed the tenuous situation on the border of Mercia and what had once been Essetir, before Cenred’s ill-fated alliance with Morgana.

Merlin tells them cheerfully to go on without her, and walks out of the room under her own power. The instant the doors shut behind her, she grips at Gaius’s arm, throwing most of her weight onto him.

He beckons the nearest guards and they hasten her to her chambers. Her ladies and maidservants appear in a timely manner out of nowhere, divesting her of her gown down to her shift. She’s still a fairly modest girl, his niece, so there isn’t any jewelry to worry about, no cosmetics to wipe off her face before she’s guided into bed.

(Not that she needs them. Arthur has aged well, but he has still aged. Merlin hasn’t changed since the day she first walked into his chambers, not even a single line around her eyes.)

Gwen arrives, breathless. She’s a proper lady now, married to Sir Lancelot as she is, but she’s attended to all of Merlin’s births since Prince Balin. She could unofficially be called the royal midwife by this point, though there are a number of others on retainer now.

Merlin’s water doesn’t break until around ninety minutes in, and she flinches as it does. Soon afterward, she’s screaming, the curtains of the bed rustling with energy in the instant before every window in the room breaks.

On the furthest wall of her chambers, by the table where she breaks her fast every morning, the portrait of Balinora that’s hung there for a decade rattles against the stone wall. She stares out from it passively, as always—it’s not terribly true to life, no art is, but Gaius has looked at it long and hard over the years, felt her gaze every time he’s come to help usher one of her grandchildren into the world. Today, her eyes seem only half on the scene before her, ambiguously slanted towards the broken windows where crows have come to roost.

Merlin can’t stand when she’s moved from the bed while the sheets are changed for dry ones, staggering four steps to the nearest chair and falling into it with a grimace.

Her maids do their best to get her into a fresh shift, Gaius turning his back for propriety’s sake as they struggle at it. They’re helping her along back to the fresh bed when he turns back around, and a midwife moves to check her as soon as she’s settled.

She nods and smiles to Merlin pleasantly, and immediately takes Gaius aside when she’s done.

“The child is feet-down,” she mutters to him under her breath.

“Are you sure?”

She looks affronted. “I know what I’m doing.”

Gaius waves her away and shuffles over to the side of the bed, reaching down to press fingers into her abdomen.

“What are you doing?” she demands, breathless. “Gaius?”

He distinctly tries not to think of Arthur, born in Ygraine’s bed of blood. Of all the prosperity visited upon the kingdom since Uther’s death, which could so very easily be undone beneath the weight of a king’s grief.

“I believe the child is in the wrong position,” he tells her, after a pause.

Merlin’s eyes widen, then narrow. “Don’t tell Arthur. Not—not yet.”

He nods at her sharply, in full agreement. Then he beckons Gwen over and rattles off rapid-fire instructions at her, the both of them feeling for the fetus beneath Merlin’s skin. Gaius eventually finds the head, very much where it shouldn’t be, and he and Gwen both try their damndest to massage it down to the proper position, pushing and prodding at Merlin’s abdomen while she bites her lip bloody.

There’s no guaranteed method of doing this. Gaius _thinks_ he feels it shift, enough that his anxiety recedes just a touch, but when the pushing begins, that same midwife from earlier looks up from between Merlin’s legs, eyes scared, and shakes her head.

In all of the royal births, Gaius has never yet had to actually inspect Merlin so personally, but there’s no getting around it now. The shifting had had some effect, but not quite enough to get it into the natural position.

And Merlin, by this time, is sweaty and exhausted, dry-heaving into a basin held by a maidservant at the side of the bed. And just outside the room, Arthur is doubtlessly pacing, crippled with fear in a way not even the strongest of Camelot’s foes could ever reduce him to.

So as Merlin pushes, Gaius _tugs_, because the mother is far more important than some unborn thing yet to even take its first breath, that already has an abundance of living siblings.

Merlin shrieks like he’s never heard her, convulsing against her mattress. And something else is shrieking, too, but Gaius—Gaius isn’t sure what he’s looking at.

“Let me see him,” Merlin finally demands, once she raggedly catches her breath.

And it _is_ a him, Gaius can tell. He’s just not sure what the rest of it is. Its shoulder is out of socket, Gaius’s fault from the delivery, but the rest of it, _the rest of it_—

“What’s wrong with him?” Merlin breathes, so horrified she can barely speak. “What—I, I don’t understand, what—?”

It’s not drawing in air normally. He doesn’t know how it could possibly could.

But Merlin is still seeping blood, bruised and torn from the trauma, so Gaius tries to ignore it in favor of tending to her, even though he knows _exactly_ why it is the way it is.

All of Merlin’s births have been very, very lucky. Even poor Alaric, who fractured his shoulder blades as he left the womb; even mad Branwen sweating and writhing beneath the force of her dreams as naught but a babe, and Meriadoc with his poor, faltering speech.

(All of Merlin’s children look so very much like Uther.)

“What’s wrong with him?!” she cries, huddling him to her chest, eyes bleeding gold as she tries again and again, every spell she can think of, to make him right.

But nothing can. And Gaius knows why.

.

The child’s breathing is stertorous, a labored, inefficient wheeze.

Merlin holds him to her chest, tears on her cheeks, and doesn’t let Arthur see him until he’s choked and convulsed and gone silent.

.

Sometimes, when an unsatisfactory child is born, parents will say the infant is not really theirs, just the _plentyn cael_, a changeling. Replaced by the spawn of a Sidhe or Spriggan, a healthy babe stolen away and exchanged for some product of twisted magic.

But there’s a room full of witnesses to Merlin’s latest birth. And though the child _is_ a spawn of magic, inarguably, that’s not the issue.

Gaius knows that to the exclusion of anyone else.

.

For the first time in over a decade, Arthur opens the crypts. He buries his newest son beside where he and Merlin will rest one day, a fair way distant from Uther.

(He’s always thought that perhaps his father had been resentful, in his last days, that Arthur could so easily get heirs on his queen. An heir and a spare before Uther was ever even dead, only eighteen months apart, and since then they’ve been so _lucky_, every child spared the illnesses that take so many others. The royal nursery has always been full to bursting with _life_, so much life it seemed able to blot out the specter of death that inevitably hangs over childhood.)

Merlin is despondent, unable to decide on a name. Nor can Arthur, because he’s spent years worrying about his children’s mother, to the exclusion of so common another outcome.

(Except it’s not an illness that takes this youngest son of his. Not a fever or a cough.

Whatever, exactly, it is, Arthur cannot put into words.)

.

Balinora looks impatient in her portrait, Gaius finally decides. Like she can’t bear that Uther commissioned it.

(Can’t bear that he _saved_ it, all those years, until Merlin and Arthur found it hidden away in one of his most carefully concealed storerooms.)

It stares at him with blue-grey eyes, as its daughter muffles tears behind him, bites sobs into the flesh of the back of her hand. Arthur tries to comfort her, but in some ways she’s stronger than him, gritting her teeth against emotions that play across his face before he’s able to shove them away.

Gaius thinks that perhaps, he has a kingdom in his hands at his moment. And he’s _afraid_, terrified beneath the force of their grief and confusion in a peculiar, suffocating way he’s never felt before, even at the height of the Purges.

_“Why?”_ is all Merlin has asked, ever since the birth.

(She cast spell after spell after spell. But still its breathing grew more and more jagged, sucked in through its twisted mouth, until the effort grew to be too much at all.)

“These things just . . . happen sometimes, my girl,” he finally says, and he knows very well she understands the truth of that. She was his assistant for years, saw many times over the vagaries birth can bring.

But she’s _keen_, oh so keen, and while he’s not the one who first taught her to lie—she’d been doing it all her life, long before they met—he _is_ the one who refined it, buffed and polished her capabilities until it was simply a skin she wore far more naturally than any dress.

And that’s a blade that cuts both ways, because now she can scent a lie on him the same way one of Arthur’s prize hounds scents blood.

“It doesn’t happen to _me_, Gaius!” she shrieks, gasping for air. “What aren’t you telling me?!”

Perhaps she’s become arrogant through the years. But is it truly arrogance if it’s true? She is Emrys, _Ambrosia_—in her is pure life, flowing freely, immortal and unending. She is the ripening of wheat, the leaves that sprout on trees each spring, the new grass that pushes up from the dirt.

However could this happen to something that supped for nine months from that ceaseless cup?

“When you met her . . .” Gaius begins, but he has to stop, swallow a lump in his throat. His extremities feel cold. “Did—did Balinora speak to you of your father?”

He already knows the answer, of course, but he simply doesn’t know where to start.

“No.” Merlin pauses, breathing heavily. When he doesn’t continue, she presses: “Why? I’m—I’m a bastard, I’ve always known that, I just assumed—”

“Balinora came to Uther’s court when she was very young. Not a child, but not—not quite a woman yet. But over the years she grew greatly both in—in power, ability, and . . . in beauty.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” she all but hisses, impatient for anything outside her grief.

It feels unreal to Gaius, this entire situation. He couldn’t possibly be here, after so many years, about to say what he’s about to say. Perhaps if it had been a long time ago, when she first came to Camelot, before—marriage and children and coronation and so many other things too late to be undone.

It’s his own fault. But he’d give anything to not pay this price for it.

“Uther greatly favored Balinora in those days,” he finally says.

They both stare at him uncomprehendingly. Neither is too stupid to catch on, but why would they ever _want_ to?

“Merlin,” he breathes, glancing one last time at Balinora. She stares back, inscrutable. Perhaps she’s passing judgment on him. “He’s your father.”

Merlin looks at him so very, very blankly. So does Arthur, even though he’s already had to long ago process Uther’s lust for Vivienne, the consequences it caused.

“What?” she says eventually, voice as flat as her expression.

Gaius closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. “Uther is your father. Balinora was—was with child when he sentenced her to die. But I couldn’t let it happen.”

Merlin shakes her head, again and again and again, eyes flinty, narrow, but they begin to widen incrementally with each word that falls from her mouth. “No, no, no, no, no, you’re lying, you’re—”

But Merlin knows very well when he’s lying, and just as well when he’s not.

But she keeps talking, even as her voice cracks: “Why would you—is this some kind of _joke_? I never thought you _cruel_, Gaius, I—”

“I have been cruel to you, Merlin,” he says, giving her a sharp nod. “And I have lied to you, for years. At first, I thought it was to be kind, that—that you would rather _not know_. But by the time I realized your ignorance was dangerous to you, it was already too late.”

“No,” she says one last time, feebly.

Arthur _laughs_—laughs hysterically like it’s the most absurd thing he’s ever heard. (And it’s very condescending, that laugh, but is there something a touch mad in its highest notes?)

“Merlin _is_ magic, Gaius. Made flesh. _Emrys_. Even if—if my father _did _take Lady Balinora to bed, how could—? I mean, surely—not to cast aspersions on your mother, but—_surely_ someone else fathered Merlin!”

“Do you not remember your own mother, your highness? Your own birth? A life for a life. The most basic of rules governing all magic. And Uther did take _so very _many lives. Erased so much magic from the world. It paid him back a thousandfold, in the cruelest way. It’s only what he deserved but not you, Merlin. Not you.”

Merlin can’t seem to get her breath. She falls forward, catching herself on the nearest table with one white-knuckled hand, gasping for air. “Why?” she manages, one last time.

Gaius doesn’t know anymore what she means. Perhaps she’s asking it of fate itself. But he can’t answer for that, so he explains what small part he can: “The old texts that survive say the Egyptians did it, in the Pharaoh’s household. To preserve the royal bloodline, given they believed themselves descended from their gods. But there’s medical evidence that children born to . . . related parents can be—can have—”

Merlin seems to choke, or whine, or make some similar tortured sound. She pushes past him, all at once a flurry of motion, their shoulders slamming against each other as she flees her own chambers.

Arthur immediately makes after her but Gaius holds him back. He’s just a weak old man by this point, his joints crippled and his bones fragile, but perhaps Arthur has been reduced by the weight of the revelation, because he slumps in Gaius’s hold.

“She’ll come back to you, Sire,” he says. Because that _is _the one thing he’s sure of—has been sure of for years and years. Master, lover, husband, _brother_—Merlin will always do her duty to Arthur.

Whether or not it’s to her detriment.

.

Gaius finds her much later, after tracking her through the castle. There were signs she’d been in her old room in his chambers, but she’d been long gone by the time he checked. Finally he manages to locate her high above, on the tallest battlement, staring out between the merlons at the fields in the distance. All of them the peculiar tan-brown of death.

“Do you remember—?” she begins, before he ever even announces his presence. He halts in his tracks. “—the unicorn? The one I saw when I was a maiden?”

Gaius nods jerkily, even though she can’t see him. “Yes . . .?”

She rests an elbow atop stone, weeps bitterly into her hand. “And Arthur killed it.”

.

The Queen returns to Court within the week, a figure in black that enters amid the flutter of crows’ wings. No crown atop her head, just those birds on her shoulders and pecking after the hem of her gown.

The whole of the castle has heard by now, and truly, it’s to be expected, isn’t it—losing at least one child? Whether at birth or in the months afterward? _Normalcy _would’ve taken one far sooner, but they all know the Queen is far beyond that.

And many of the courtiers do love her in their way, even if it’s love born of admiration from afar. Some express their sympathies and she tries to smile, to accept their words as graciously as she once would’ve, but there’s something just so very _brittle_ about her.

(_And her eyes seem so very flat_.)

After court (and beside her King, Merlin is so very, very patient with every petitioner, as fair as Uther never was), Arthur’s council reconvenes.

Merlin takes her seat with those birds pecking at her hair.

Mercia is being unreasonable, the first man reports.

But it's slowly expanded its territory for years by being varying degrees of _unreasonable_, says another.

A border skirmish should never be taken this far, says a third.

_But Bayard wants war_, is the conclusion.

And Merlin smiles. Looks at her brother-husband with a prewritten madness, woven by fate at her conception.

“Then we’ll give it to him.”

**Author's Note:**

> Merlin reenacts The Wicker Man (1973). I just did a little research on Druids and threw everything I could at it, accurate or not. Also I find all those bog bodies really interesting, especially how they think they might've been sacrificed. There's also some Hermeticism referenced, which is ancient but not Celtic. I just find it kind of interesting. And a lot of that entire section was inspired by the painting [The Magic Circle](https://pixels.com/featured/the-magic-circle-john-william-waterhouse.html) by John William Waterhouse.
> 
> So, Merlin and Arthur attempt to set precedent for Queen Victoria having a huge number of children, but are thwarted at the last second by the vast scope of Uther's sleaziness. They then have a basic biology lesson royal families will have to learn over and over again for generations to come.
> 
> "Mona" is an obscure reference to this time the Romans invaded a Druid stronghold on the island of Anglesey, then called Mona, and killed everyone. Alaric is then the guy who several hundred years later sacked the city of Rome for the first time.
> 
> Most of the other kids' names are just Welsh ones, 'cause I, uh, suck at naming OC kids.
> 
> "Ever After" is from the Resident Evil 3 soundtrack.
> 
> -Anna


End file.
